Trouble Down Under

‘The Hanging Garden,’ by Patrick White

The most cross-grained of writers, Patrick White went out of his way to mention, in acknowledging his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, that a newspaper had labeled him “Australia’s most unreadable novelist.” He wore the insult with pride. It did not mean he wasn’t Australia’s greatest novelist — which he knew he was. But White was never loved by his countrymen, who found his outspoken views of them and their homeland unpalatable. Australia, White said, proved you could recycle excrement. It’s hard to forgive a remark like that. More so as White used a blunter term than “excrement.”

“The Hanging Garden” has been, hitherto, a genuinely unreadable work in that it was among the last things White wrote, at a period in his life when his health (but not his mind) was failing. He finished only a third of the narrative and gave instructions to his executors that the unrevised manuscript should never be published. White’s prohibition has been defied, 23 years after his death, and we can now read the long fragment. The plot, as we have it, is simple. It is 1942. Two children have been sent from war-torn Europe to the safety of Australia. They are, in that country’s slang term, “reffos” — admitted as refugees but not welcomed as guests.

Gilbert’s mother has been killed in the London blitz. His friend Nigel was killed as well. That means a lot to him. Gil’s father is away at war; the boy thinks of him as a colonel, not a parent. His father means nothing to him. Eirene’s father, a Greek Communist, was murdered before the war while imprisoned for his political beliefs. Her mother is Australian by birth and to escape the imminent German occupation of Greece she has brought her daughter to the safety of a Sydney suburb called Neutral Bay. The place actually exists, about two and a half miles from the center of the city. (It will not be much flattered by this novel, one can predict.) The odd name originates from the historical fact that it was once where ships of all nations could dock until a suspicious maritime bureaucracy checked them out. The symbolism, as regards Gil and Eirene, is lightly suggested.

On the way back to the war zone (with a lover) Eirene’s mother is also killed by a German bomb. The two children, orphan and half orphan, are billeted with a benign but ineffectual landlady, Mrs. Bulpit, whose husband, she tells them, dropped dead while having his afternoon tea. Mrs. Bulpit looks like a mountain of white marzipan, drinks immoderately, burps and breaks wind and either burns or overcooks the “grub” she serves up into total inedibility. She is both kind and horrible. In the children’s eyes, most Australians are horrible, and very few are kind. Eirene (soon renamed Irene, or Reenie) has an aunt living nearby, but, mysteriously, there is no room for her at that particular inn. The reason emerges late in the novel: her uncle is not “safe” around little girls.

Neutral Bay is safe enough from bombs and Germans, but it’s an emotional wasteland. “More people,” Irene concludes, “hate than love one another.” It’s not clear that even Irene and Gil love each other — there’s some bed sharing (and a nasty bed-wetting incident) that suggests they get along as two lifers might who have to share a cell and make the best of it. They find a little Eden in Mrs. Bulpit’s wild garden and build a “cubby” — a tree house. It also serves as a “dunny.” (Look it up in a dictionary of Oz-speak, if you don’t know.)

Photo

Patrick White.Credit
Courtesy of the Estate of Patrick White

Gil and Irene’s time in Neutral Bay lasts only a little while. Their caretaker, as careless of her own health as those of her two charges, dies, and the children move on into adolescence and separate lives. There are hints that Gil will realize he’s gay, as was White. Australia was not a tolerant place at that time.

White’s masterpiece, “Voss,” is a fable about the exploration of Australia’s impenetrable outback. “The Hanging Garden” is different and, for lovers of White’s work, hugely exciting. It depicts, with extraordinary delicacy, what goes on at that moment in life when the young mind is beginning to “make sense” of sensation. It is, I think, something entirely new in his work.

Why did White suddenly adopt, at this very late stage of his career, what looks like a quite different mode of narration from that which he had so carefully cultivated over the years? The most plausible reason is that he started “The Hanging Garden” virtually the day after he finished writing his explosive memoir, “Flaws in the Glass,” a book that focuses, in pained detail, on his experiences when he was about the same age as Gil and Irene. He too was uprooted, a sort of reverse “reffo.” His parents, in that wholly misguided way of seemingly well-intentioned adults, decided to wash the Australianness off him by sending him to one of the most eminent of British public (that is to say, very private, very expensive) schools. He felt himself a “foreigner” there, scarcely “daring to open my mouth for fear of the toads which might tumble out and the curled lips, cold eyes, waiting to receive renewed evidence of what made me unacceptable to the British ruling class.” He suffered and would, as his memoir’s title indicates, be “flawed” for the rest of his life.

Writing his memoir drew White back into recollections of his own childhood, to considerations of the adolescent mind — how wonderfully perceptive it is, how easily bruised. Not to raise a chorus of Australian scoffs, but you could say “The Hanging Garden” is a Proustian novel.

How would the rest of the narrative have proceeded? A surviving note suggests the story might have been brought forward to the 1980s. In that tantalizing information one can taste a novel that will never be read. It would, one can confidently say, have been a great Australian novel.

Even as it stands, “The Hanging Garden” is a novel for our time — a story about parentless children, mistreated by a world that, by its lights, intends no harm but nonetheless does enduring damage. Australia’s prime ministers have made remarkable “national apologies” to the country’s young people. One, in 2008, was to the “stolen generation” of Australian aboriginal children, forcibly given to white families. The other, a few months ago, was to victims of the similar practice of forcibly “adopting out” the babies of unwed mothers. We must, the present prime minister, Julia Gillard, told Australia, using the full force of her office, treat our children with more understanding. In an oblique way, “The Hanging Garden,” with its adoptee hero and heroine, supports that plea — that we should know our children better and feel their vulnerability, not recycle them or treat them like excrement.

Digging up a novelist’s work from his grave is a messy business. We should be eternally glad that Max Brod defied his friend Kafka’s instruction that all his manuscript fiction be destroyed, “preferably unread.” We might wish Ernest Hemingway had been left to rest in peace and that his family had not exhumed the imperfect “Islands in the Stream” and the even more imperfect “True at First Light.” David Marr, White’s biographer, and others dedicated to White’s memory, decided to give us “The Hanging Garden.” They were right to do so, and we should thank them for it. White, I suspect, would feel very differently.

THE HANGING GARDEN

By Patrick White

225 pp. Picador. Paper, $15.

John Sutherland’s most recent book is “Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives.”

A version of this review appears in print on May 26, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Trouble Down Under. Today's Paper|Subscribe